Joan Rivers and the Power of Not Apologizing

She didn't back down, which in today's world is miraculous

When you talk about Joan Rivers, you have to talk about that face. Pretty, if somewhat average, when she was a sharp young comedian on Johnny Carson, where she made her name, it turned into a barely moving mask that became a wide source of ridicule in her later years. Why she changed it — because she felt it was too Jewish, or because of the more humdrum insecurity that comes with old age — doesn't matter. As Joan herself said, she was doing the same thing plenty of women in her position were also doing, but they weren't talking about it. "Goldie Hawn has a totally different face from when she started," she once said. That's classic Joan: She loved calling others out by name, making them own up to who they were. Why shouldn't she have? No one, after all, owned up to who she was more honestly, more fiercely, and more hilariously than Joan Rivers.

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The safest defense against criticism is to ignore it. Savvy public figures from Thomas Jefferson to Beyonce have known this. Rivers never followed that polite tactic. She didn't ignore critics, she inflamed them and threw their heckling back at them, and not just about her plastic surgery, which she defended openly. She's known for having told black jokes, AIDS jokes, and other crude bits that made a significant portion of audiences cringe, perhaps because she was laughing about things she didn't necessarily represent, though her jokes rarely if ever came from a place of hate. Instead, Rivers believed powerfully in comedy's ability to help us resolve, or at least deal with, those subjects that make us most uncomfortable.

There's an amazing moment in the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work in which Rivers does a standup bit about Helen Keller. An audience member interrupts her routine to say that it's offensive and unfunny. Rivers's reaction in this moment reveals her conviction. Every comic in this position has a natural fight-or-flight response. Rivers's instinct was always to fight. You can watch the full scene below, and read the transcript:

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JOAN RIVERS: Ugh, I hate children. The only child that I think I would have liked ever was Helen Keller because she didn't talk.

HECKLER: It is just... Not very funny.

JR: Yes, it is. And if you don't, then leave!

HECKLER: It's not very funny if you have a deaf son.

JR: I happen to have a deaf mother. Oh, you stupid ass. Let me tell you what comedy is about.

HECKLER: You go ahead and tell me what comedy's about.

JR: Oh, please. You are so stupid. Comedy is to make everybody laugh at everything and deal with things, you idiot. My mother is deaf, you stupid son of a bitch. Don't tell me. And just in case you can hear me in the hallway, I lived for nine years with a man with one leg. Okay, you asshole? And we're going to talk about what it's like to have a man with one leg who lost it in World War II and never went back to get it, because that's fucking littering. So don't you tell me what's funny. Comedy is to make us laugh. If we didn't laugh, where the hell would we all be? Think about that.

You can hear Rivers's voice break as she verbally attacks her heckler and says, "Don't tell me what's funny." She was always firm about what comedy is for, what it's "allowed" to address, and she never backed down from that.

The world now, particularly in that outrage machine known as the Internet, is full of people falling all over themselves to apologize. Some say sorry for truly heinous things, others for trivial things, but the apologies rarely feel genuine in this noisy atmosphere. The apologizers are feeding a beast. That beast is a network of individuals who wake up wanting to be offended, who want to feel the indignity of the insult and the self-righteousness of their reaction, because it makes them feel better about themselves.

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In general, those outraged people silence our conversation. They make us politically correct and occasionally highlight real injustice, yes, but they also make us less inclined to speak our mind, which is unfortunate. Silence is a capitulation to those who insist you can't talk about those things. When a woman in Hollywood has plastic surgery and doesn't talk about it or avoids the question, she is acquiescing to the moral standard that what she is doing is wrong. The same is true of comics who delete tweets or half-heartedly backpedal jokes that have offended that were nevertheless clearly funny, clearly well-intentioned. They have given up. That's something Joan Rivers would never abide.

There is a courage in not apologizing, for its own sake. If you truly believe you're in the right, as Joan usually did, and you don't apologize, you may even find that public perception turns around to you. The headlines about Rivers's death are full of pronouncements about her "soul-baring" and "trailblazing" comedy, or how she "turned tragedy into comedy." That praise rarely met Rivers when she was making jokes about abortion back in the day when you could hardly speak of the act on television. But Rivers was brave enough, and believed in her work enough, to carry on without saying sorry. Now she's widely revered for just that. Shamelessness is her ultimate legacy, and a guiding light to everyone who's inspired by her.

This isn't to say that Joan Rivers was arrogant. To the contrary, she was deeply insecure. It was the subject of her documentary. You can hear it in her croak as she fires back at the heckler. The insecurity was even written on her face, tucked and cut up to defend against old age or self-hatred. But she didn't apologize for any of these anxieties, either, and instead she did what she did best, which was to make people laugh about them.

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